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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rose from the bottom to become a multi-billionaire, but that doesn’t mean he’s above small tasks.
The 62-year-old CEO of the world’s most valuable company declared his humble roots as a dishwasher actually helped him learn not to neglect any task.
“You cannot entrust me with a task that does not suit me,” he said in a interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which recently resurfaced on X.
Even in his most modest job, the ninth richest man in the world has never shied away from dirty work.
“I’ve cleaned a lot of toilets. I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined, and some of them are just invisible,” he said.
If someone approaches Huang asking for help, he says he at least tries to contribute. That way, at least, the person facing the problem can see a new way of thinking about the problem, he added.
“If you send me something and you want my opinion on it, and I can be helpful to you, and in my review, share with you how I reason, I’ve made a contribution to you,” Huang said. “I allowed you to see how I reason through something, and in reasoning, as you know, how someone reasons through something gives you power.”
These values have been fundamental to Huang’s leadership style and partly explain why he is worth $161.8 billion. according to Forbes. Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the United States at age 9 without his parents. As a teenager, he took a job as a dishwasher at Denny’s.
It was actually at Denny’s that Nvidia, Huang’s future company, got its start, according to the NVIDIA website.
Years after working the line as a dishwasher, the Stanford graduate met with his future co-founders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, to discuss the idea of a chip that would make 3D graphics possible on a PC. This idea gave birth to what would later become Nvidia, a chip empire that is now worth $4.5 trillion.
It wasn’t easy at first, according to Huang. When he presented the idea to his boss at LSI Logic, Wilfred Corrigan, he called it “one of the worst elevator pitches he’d ever heard.”
However, Corrigan convinced Don Valentinethe founder of Sequoia Capital, to hear the speech because of Huang’s strong work ethic.
Elon Musk, who actually played a role in Nvidia’s origin story, commented on Huang’s interview that resurfaced this week.
“That’s how it is,” Musk wrote on Despite Huang’s skepticism that a nonprofit would buy a $300,000 computer, he personally delivered it in San Francisco to what he later realized was the OpenAI team behind ChatGPT. Musk left OpenAI in 2018.
